1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to the field of software applications for transforming data into graphical representations of relationships. More specifically, this invention relates to an interactive tool that arranges and orders relationships between entities.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many objects have complicated relationships to other objects. For example, a band makes music as a group, but then the individual members frequently produce solo albums. A diagram that illustrates the albums associated with the band and band members can be organized according to a hierarchical structure. If you add another relationship into the diagram, however, such as producers of the albums, the relationships become too complicated to represent in a hierarchy.
A graph can effectively represent the band albums, the individual solo albums, and producer relationships, but representing this information even on a graph becomes increasingly difficult to visualize as the number and density of the relationships increases. The resulting complexity of the networks of relationships quickly overwhelms human comprehension, which obscures important patterns and orderings within the relationships. While many interfaces for visualizing networks of relationships exist, they cannot readily reveal orderings of relationships that further clarify the connections between two objects.